John Ford

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Tool making flourished once we had language because we no longer had to watch somebody making something in order to make the same thing. People could describe what they’d done, and others could then duplicate those steps. After all, people now lived in a world that included lots of things they themselves had never physically seen. If someone in a group had seen it, everyone else had as good as seen it, for it was now part of the furniture in the symbolic world that others of this person’s group inhabited. Skills and knowledge could accumulate in that symbolic world, as each generation built on ...more
The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection
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